Lootable Map Items. Maps of urban locations within the Knox Event Exclusion Zone can be found in relevant towns, in particular spawning in gas stations. Current maps you can find cover Muldraugh, West Point, Rosewood and March Ridge.

Using the new map UI you can zoom with the mouse wheel, add your own notes and a bunch of provided symbols in four different colours – if you have the relevant coloured pens. Annotated maps can be shared with friends and faction members in MP. Last week’s vid here.

Improved ovens and microwaves. You now have access to a new oven/microwave settings UI upon which you can change the temperature, and use the timer dial. Ovens will ‘ding’ when the time is up, microwaves will turn off. Metal in microwaves can cause fire.

Some food will become less edible when microwaved, increasing character sadness. Eating food hot/cold will have relevant impact on character happiness/sadness.

Renewed work on the SP anims release continues, intermingled with a successful and fun day last week melding minds with Animator Martin so that he could get to work on an issue that we felt could vastly improve the capabilities of our reanimated zeds.

Right now, in every build of the game, zombies can only move backwards and forwards. This is fine, but severely limits what’s possible in the long run. Proper turning animations have never been possible (survivors and zeds slide in a circle unless they’re moving), and likewise zombies stumbling in a realistic way and being able to move from side-to-side as well as their traditional PZ bee-line.

As of last week, then, we managed to work out a way to implement rotational root motion and Martin could return to his animator’s den and get to work on the visual side of it all. In more technical terms we’ve now opened up the opportunity to have deferred rotation within anims, which in turn means that animations will be able to drive a character’s rotation just as much as movement.

Behind the scenes Martin has been working on a bunch of the other features/visuals that the animations system will open up to us, and this expansion will give him even more options from refinements and improvements (extra wall-hugging stealth stuff fr’instance) while we continue to get the SP anims branch into operation for testing back at TIS Towers.